The
holidays are the season for family gatherings. We’ve just finished
Thanksgiving, and now we’re headed into Christmas. For many of us, that means that
three, four, or maybe even five generations are all together in one place at
one time, elbow to elbow, sharing meals, memories, and merriment. Those
experiences can be marvelous! When a family is loving and supportive, you can
feel like you’re in the middle of a Norman Rockwell painting, with everyone joining
together in harmony: grandma and grandpa, mom and dad, sisters and brothers,
aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Family
isn’t always like that, though. Family gatherings sometimes are less like a
Norman Rockwell painting and more like a scene from Murder on the Orient Express. We all have at least one relative who
gets on our last nerve; and some of us have whole families that we would like
to ship en masse to outer Mongolia! I’ll
bet that you’ve met these relatives sometime along the line (even if they are
someone else’s relatives): Cousin Ben thinks that he’s funny, but his
never-ending jokes are usually offensive. Aunt Maggie is a complainer. Nothing
is ever good enough for her, whether it’s the food, the wine, or the gift that
she got in the white elephant exchange. Uncle Christopher thinks that he’s
still a young stud, and he’ll hit on every woman in the room during the course
of the evening. And we can’t forget Cousin Lil, who can’t stop talking
politics. She usually ends up in a screaming match with someone who is at the
opposite end of the political spectrum. I don’t know about you, but relatives
like these make me crazy! The trouble is, if I want to see the relatives that I
do
like, I have to put up with the relatives that I don’t like. Sometimes I
wonder if it’s worth it. After all, I could curl up with a cup of cocoa and a good
book in front of the fireplace, and I wouldn’t have to put up with all the
nonsense! Sometimes I seriously consider skipping the party altogether.
We
probably all feel that way now and then. Even God considered skipping the party
long ago. You heard some of God’s thoughts in this morning’s scripture reading
from the prophet Hosea (11:1-9). The text begins with God reminiscing, as we
all do at the holidays: how God brought the Hebrews out of Egypt and led them
to their own land. God pictures Israel as a child, and Godself as their mother:
giving birth to a nation, teaching them to stand on their own, feeding them,
and comforting them tenderly. And what did those people do in return? Why, they worshiped Baal, the Canaanite fertility god! The Israelite nation was like a
spoiled teenager who shows up at the family gathering and then sulks in the
corner with his head buried in his smartphone because he’d rather be someplace else.
By the middle of that reading from Hosea, God has had it with Israel! God is
not only going to skip the party; God is planning to give Israel a lesson that
it will never forget! But the reading doesn’t end that way. On the verge of
throwing the book at Israel, God suddenly stops. “How can I give you up?” God
asks. “How can I hand you over? How can I treat you like other nations that I
have destroyed?” In fact, God decides not to do things that way anymore, because
God isn’t a human being who responds in anger when human beings turn into jerks.
God decides not only to join the family gathering, but to arrive patient and
loving. You heard how God did that, too. It’s in the gospel of John. “For God
so loved the world that he gave his one and only son… And God didn’t send his
son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it.” (John 3:16-17)
Things
haven’t changed much since Hosea’s time. Oh, we may not worship Baal anymore;
but we give God plenty of reasons to skip the family celebration year after
year. In his classic story “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens indicated two
of them. Near the end of the visit of the Ghost of Christmas Present to
Ebenezer Scrooge, the ghost throws open his robe to reveal two emaciated
children. One, he announces, is Want and the other is Ignorance. They are the
results of humanity’s greed and thirst for power. Those dreadful children are
still at every single family gathering that we humans have during the holidays.
There are those who are hungry and thirsty and cold because some of us, like
Scrooge, hoard the resources that we have. And there are those of us who live
in ignorance, because some of us don’t really care about anybody but themselves.
With family like that, why in the world would God want to show up?
But
God does show up, year after year after year, ever since the son of two
peasants was born in a barn in a little town in the Middle East. And the things
that we emphasize at Christmas time are not the things that concern God at all.
We focus on shining lights and beautiful decorations and gaily wrapped gifts,
all in a cozy family room by a cheerfully blazing fireplace. But because God
cares about injustice, we should ponder the injustice of a government that
forced people to travel miles from their homes just so that taxes could be
increased. Because God cares that we live lives that are fulfilled, we should
contemplate the blackness of a midnight stable – like the blackness that we
live in most of the time – and that the child born there is our Light. And
because God cares about our behavior, we might consider that the Christ child
was born in the midst of animals because we behave like animals ourselves most
of the time. Jesus was born so that he could teach us what justice is really
all about; so that he could lead us out of the darkness that we live in; and so
that he could show us how to live as human beings instead of like violent, greedy
animals. Jesus wasn’t born to condemn us; Jesus was born to save us! Jesus was
born because we were getting on God’s last nerve; but God couldn’t bear the
thought of skipping the family gathering, so God took steps to fix things!
This
year, when we celebrate the birth of the Christ child one more time, stop and
thank God for coming to the party! You might even try just a little harder to
be the kind of person that God would really like to associate with. After all, we’re the reason that God is here at
all. This year, let’s make God feel welcome, shall we?
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